Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Unfinished, Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”

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To Dance Is to Live

May 29, 2014 — Pat Bertram

At lunch after a dance class a couple of days ago, a friend and I were discussing why we don’t have bucket lists. We agreed there are too many things in the world that either we’re not aware of, or if we are aware of the things, we’re not aware that we would like to try them.

For example, we’re both taking dance classes, which have become lifesavers to us. (Like me, she’d been mired in grief and took dancing as a way of moving on with her life.) Neither of us ever had such an inclination before, so dancing would never have been on our bucket lists. I’m not even much for dancing around the house, though for a while, I did what I called “dance therapy” in an effort to overcome the lingering grief after the death of Jeff, my life mate/soul mate. This therapy worked to a certain extent, but . . . I don’t know . . . maybe it was too soon, maybe the songs were too sad, maybe it was simply that I didn’t know how to dance.

I took therapy yoga for a while, which did help with grief. When those classes were canceled after the teacher got an offer of a fantastic job, I played around with learning Tai Chi, which incidentally was something that would have been on my bucket list since I’d always wanted to do it, but I didn’t feel the connection with Tai Chi that I’d expected. And it must not have been in the cards for me anyway. When I went to sign up for classes after the free introductory lessons were over, I found the office closed. (They are closed every other Friday, but since they never said which was the other other Friday, I had no way of knowing what the right day would have been.)

A few days after my aborted attempt to sign up for Tai Chi, I’d planned to meet a friend for lunch. As I waited for her, I paced the sidewalk in front of the row of shops, and there I saw a dance studio. On a whim, I stopped in to see if classes were being offered to adults, what the classes were, and how much they cost. The prices were so cheap it seemed a shame not to try at least one of the classes before I settled for Tai Chi. The only class that didn’t need any props or special clothes was jazz, so that’s what I started with.

And I came alive.

In an effort to find a renewed interest in life, I’d been doing many things I would never have had a chance to do before Jeff’s death, but everything I did was like dropping pebbles in the sand of grief. Although I enjoyed my excursions and activities while I was doing them, none of that momentary happiness rippled through the rest of my life. Yoga did to a certain extent, but with dance . . . oh my. Ripples galore.

By the middle of the following month, I was taking ballet, Egyptian belly dance, tap, and Hawaiian in addition to jazz, and recently I started Tahitian.

Dancing is hard for me. I’m not naturally rhythmic, not naturally musically inclined, not naturally poised or balanced. Nor am I one for doing anything in a group. (Do I need to mention that I am far from having a dancer’s body?) And yet, it was love at first . . . not sight. Feel maybe.

A lot of the joy of dancing for me comes from learning something completely new, since more than anything I love to learn, but it’s the whole of the dance experience I’m enamored with — the music, the various steps, the choreography, dancing as one with the rest of the group, the other women in the class. Most of the women are a lot older than I am, but they are a heck of a lot more graceful and agile. Actually, they are a heck of a lot more graceful and agile than most women half my age.

It seems strange now that I’ve never mentioned my dance classes on this blog, but since I also once took a couple of exercise classes at the same studio, I’ve just lumped all the activity under “exercise classes.” Dancing seemed too sacred almost to use for blog fodder.

So why am I mentioning it now? The teacher, a remarkable woman just a few years short of eighty, is always having to explain to her family why she continues to teach. (You know how older people are often called “spry”? That is not a word you could ever use to describe her. To see her dance, you’d never guess her age. She dances like a girl, looks like she’s in her forties, and is still beautiful.)

Because she was born two minutes before midnight on Friday the thirteen, she laughingly calls herself a witch. And she is — a good witch with remarkable powers of bringing people to life. Bringing people happiness. Bringing people dance.

As Snoopy says, “To dance is to live. To live is to dance.”

I know you’re reading this, Ms. Cicy. So — thank you for teaching me a new way of living.

11 Responses to “To Dance Is to Live”

Love your opening – I’ve struggled with that to for those very reasons: “At lunch after a dance class a couple of days ago, a friend and I were discussing why we donât have bucket lists. We agreed there are too many things in the world that either weâre not aware of, or if we are aware of the things, weâre not aware that we would like to try them.”

Thank you. I’ve come to see that it’s more important to stay alive to what comes to us, to follow through with serendipitious encounters than to follow a prescribed list, even if it is of our own making.

Stever — Yes, a cliché. It took me a long time to figure out what a bucket list was and why it was called a bucket list. A list of things to do before you kick the bucket has always seemed strange to me. If you want to do something, do it.

Pat, we welcome you and your lovely smiling face to our dance classes. Once you begin on this journey, you will find it difficult to imagine your life without the music, movement and joy dancing brings to your life. I hope you love it as much as I do!

[…] irony is that by being here in this bizarre household, I have the freedom to indulge my newfound love of dancing. If I left, I’d have to get a job, which would leave me no time or energy for dance classes, and […]

Books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

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When Pat’s adult dance classmates discover she is a published author, the women suggest she write a mystery featuring the studio and its aging students. One sweet older lady laughingly volunteers to be the victim, and the others offer suggestions to jazz up the story. Pat starts writing, and then . . . the murders begin.

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